Quarantine, what is it and why is it useful?

A quarantine is part of an antivirus where the malicious file gets stored temporarily. The user can then manually retrieve or completely remove the file if her or she wishes to.

Let’s say your antivirus detects a legitimate file to be dangerous, and you are then left with a program that you can’t use, you desperately need this program to work in order to complete work for a deadline. What do you do? Reinstall the whole software package again? Try and get your hard drive scanned to find the lost file? There is some good news, as long as your antivirus supports quarantining (all of the main suites do) then the file isn’t actually gone, you can head over to the quarantine and pull it right out, then add an exception to the program to trust this file and you shouldn’t run into this problem again. By adding this exception in, it won’t prevent any future issues with different programs, so don’t expect flawless results from the antivirus from here-on-in.